What do we know about abortion exceptions? We know that they make it harder for anyone to get an abortion, including each person who falls under exceptions such as rape, incest, or threat to the person’s life. Manyofus in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements have written about and fought against the concept of “legitimate” or “acceptable” reasons to have an abortion. Of course we agree that no one should differentiate between an individual’s circumstances surrounding an abortion decision. But that doesn’t mean that we, and by extension, our movement, don’t also play into labelling some abortions as more necessary, important, or worthy of funding than others.

We see this manifest in a different way in direct service organizations. Our work as abortion fund volunteers is grounded in the belief that each person has a human right to bodily autonomy and to health care access. We trust that a person has the ability to make their own abortion decision, and we do not honor one person’s experience over another. But we also recognize that despite our commitment to providing non-judgmental and compassionate services, we are human–we hold to our own beliefs, or our organization’s beliefs, about who is more deserving of or more in need of our assistance. Even as we are actively trying to shed ourselves of placing more or less value on one person’s experience, we cannot ignore that we have and will continue to make exceptions for those with more difficult circumstances and less access to services.

Abortion funds operate under hostile climates with limited financial resources. That leaves many of us asking difficult questions: who most deserves our limited financial assistance? This is the reality we live in. We know some of us will give more funding to a person who is the survivor of sexual assault instead of someone who is not, or to a person who is having a later abortion because of a fatal fetal anomaly than someone who is having a later abortion because she took a longer time coming to the decision to have an abortion. Why? Because we don’t have enough money to help every individual, and we want our time and money to go to the people who “really need it”: those who are the most marginalized and therefore have the slimmest chances of accessing services on their own. No matter how much we try to get out of the paradigm that some people deserve our help more than others, the reality is that we have to prioritize, to triage. As a result, whether we like it or not, we are complicit in the exceptionalization of certain abortions.

We live and work in a country where abortion providers and grassroots reproductive justice organizations like abortion funds are becoming more and more scarce. With few funding and staff to operate, we are forced to limit the populations we serve to those we deem most in need of care. What we need to constantly keep in mind is how we are deciding who is most in need of help, and reevaluating how that fits in with our values. Are we ok with only helping certain kinds of people who need abortions? Can we strategize for a future in which we don’t have to make these tough decisions? How can we get there?

Creating our own exceptions and hierarchy of abortion situations is a necessary evil. It isn’t ideal, and it’s not what we strive for, but it is a reality of a broken system and a reflection of little time, and scarce funding, not to mention a hostile political climate. We did not choose this system, we can’t blame ourselves for operating in a way that allows us to function and sustain ourselves. But we also must ask tough questions about how we, as abortion funders and pro-choice activists, engage in abortion exceptionalism, and keep each other accountable for figuring out answers that reconcile our values with the difficult circumstances in which our organizations operate. We can fight for military insurance to cover abortion as a result of rape as long as we are also fighting to repeal the Hyde amendment. We can provide more funding to a cancer patient who needs an abortion as long as we are also figuring out ways to increase the amount of money we give people who aren’t in dire situations. As much as we critique abortion exceptionalism, we need to examine and acknowledge when we are complicit in it as well.